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So your bananas look like they’ve gone several rounds with Floyd Mayweather and you’ve tossed them into the green bin. Not a huge crime, right?

Well, look at it this way: You’ve just added to the 26,000 bananas thrown out every day in Metro Vancouver. And if you also discarded some softened, sprouted potatoes, you contributed to the 80,000 of those that get tossed.

Food waste is part of our culture of affordable plenty and it adds up to a shocker. Other waste includes 70,000 cups of milk and 32,000 loaves of bread every day, according to research by Metro Vancouver.

But attitudes are finally shifting and food is becoming part of the recycle, reuse and reduce ethos. Food in the landfill represents unbelievable amounts of wasted energy and resources all along the route from farm to household.

The Metro Vancouver ban on organic waste, as of last January, means more will be diverted and processed into biofuel or some other resource, but that’s still no reason to waste food. Metro Vancouver also launched the Love Food Hate Waste campaign last month to reduce organic waste in the home. The website lovefoodhatewaste.ca is full of information on avoiding spoilage, the flexibility of “best before” dates, food storage, menu planning, and how to shop.

It’s a global phenomenon.

In Vancouver last Wednesday, a grassroots coalition joined a worldwide eat-in called Feeding The 5,000, dramatically dishing out 5,000 servings made with rescued food from retailers, wholesalers and farmers.

Last month, France flexed its muscle against the mammoth waste at the supermarket level. Legislation requires edible foods be donated to charities; food that might not be safe for human consumption must be donated to farms for animal food or compost. Disobey and companies face fines up to $83,000 and officials could face jail time.

Metro’s Love Food Hate Waste is modelled on a U.K. program and I quickly learned something from the website myself. The levers on my fridge crisper drawers, I discovered, have a purpose. They adjust humidity levels in the drawers so that produce can be separated into high- or low-humidity areas to facilitate a longer, happier life. Vegetables like carrots, leafy greens, broccoli and cucumber like high humidity. Fruits and some vegetables that produce ethylene (which speeds spoilage) should be stored in less humid conditions (apples, pears, papayas, oranges, mushrooms).

Cookbook author Cinda Chavich, author of the recently released The Waste Not, Want Not Cookbook: Save Food, Save Money and Save The Planet, was jolted into writing the book when she heard the statistics on food waste at a conference in Portland last year. (The book has tips on what to do with orphaned ingredients in the fridge and pantry.)

“I was shocked. I started researching and there was nothing written about it in Canada. It was not on our radar. That piece is missing,” she said of the enormity of food waste, on a phone interview from her home in Victoria.

“If food was a country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas producer in the world after the U.S. and China. It’s not just a carbon footprint. It’s a foodprint.”

Chavich says 269 pounds of food is wasted per person annually and 51 per cent of it happens in the home. The idea of wasting food, she says, will one day be like littering and smoking. “Those were things people did all the time. Now you litter with a pop can and it’s a horror.”

She urges people to cook “backwards.” Check what you have in the fridge and pantry before going grocery shopping and shop with a list. “Don’t find a recipe and then go out and buy ingredients. Look at what you’ve got and plan a menu.”

She keeps a see-through bin in her fridge in which she puts things that have to be used pronto. “It’s like Chopped Canada. I devise a recipe that uses them up. You just need a few good mother recipes, like stir frying, frittata and soup, and the ingredients can go straight into them.”

She’s also kept re-usable TV-dinner style divided plates and put full meal leftovers into them, labelled them and froze them. “I called them Jennifer plates after a girlfriend who wasn’t cooking for herself. At Christmas I presented her with all these ‘Jennifer’ meals.”

She rues a system that has allowed perfectly healthy produce to be discarded because of size or colour as well, and fish to be discarded as bycatch. “Global bycatch amounts to 40 per cent of the world’s catch, or 63 billion pounds of fish per year, leading to a total collapse of global fisheries in three decades,” she writes in the book.

Some companies have devised ways to avoid food going to landfill. At Choices Markets, for instance, all organic waste has been composted and made into a gardening soil mix. It sells as Full Circle Top Soil for $4.99 in the shops (in biodegradable plastic bags).

Choices’ director of nutrition Nicole Fetterly recognizes systemic changes are needed, too. “The grading system (for fruits and vegetables) is really, really stringent and it’s more about size and colour. We can’t sell hail damaged crop, for example,” she says.

In her own household, menu planning minimizes waste. Here’s an excellent idea from her: When she makes dinner for her husband and two children, she makes enough to pack four lunches the next day.

“I’m essentially cooking for eight every time,” she says. By cooking larger amounts, she rarely has partial bags of vegetables or leftover meals languishing in the fridge. If there are extra bits of food accumulating over the week, the kids love a tapas-style spread with a variety of food to pick from — often it’s hummus, cut veggies, cheese or smoked salmon, roasted veg, crackers or bread. If she has too much milk for the week, she makes fresh ricotta (easy, she says) and will put that out, too.

On the week I interviewed her, she had four days of meals planned: tempeh rice bowl with veggies and tahini; organic roast chicken; pasta; and an assorted tapas.

She wrote Becoming A Sustainabilist (sold at Choices Markets for $13.95), a guide for living sustainably and avoiding waste. “We’ve had a plentiful supply of food at a reasonable cost so people have been taking it for granted. Now, it’s a matter of considering consequences.”

Says Chavich: “Canada is behind other countries. We’ve just got started. On the West Coast, perhaps it’s due to a lack of landfill area in populated areas, perhaps it’s a federal government in denial about climate change. But it hasn’t been on our radar. But now it’s gearing up on the West Coast and Vancouver is at the leading edge.”

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Attitudes shift toward wasted food

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